


Square Zero

by Squash (JeSuisGourde)



Series: History Of Melancholia [13]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Depression, Gen, Homelessness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 13:26:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18074249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeSuisGourde/pseuds/Squash
Summary: Grantaire finds himself on the streets, somehow further past the rock bottom he thought he'd already hit. Homeless, friendless, alone and exhausted. Everything is bleak, everything is horrible and humiliating and even drinking is failing him.





	Square Zero

**Author's Note:**

> It's been years since I updated this series. I started writing this little story a while back and then just finished today on a whim. This is just a close up on the tail end of Grantaire's life on the streets that happened in Chutes And Ladders. So, this happens during the events of Chutes And Ladders.

It's three in the morning, the bus stop bench he's huddled on is freezing, and Grantaire has no idea if his shaking is from the cold or from cravings. He never thought he'd be experiencing so many different versions of rock bottom before even reaching twenty years old, but here he is. The disgusting, cigarette-burned blanket he stole off Leroy's bed is nothing more than a sheet and does little to nothing to keep out the cold. September's almost over and the cold that clings to his skin finally matches the empty snow and nails that frost over his ribs and the space in his body that aches with a dull exhaustion.

He's been living off emptying parking meters and pocketing portions of tip jars, supporting his addiction on quarters and ones and ignoring the looks of bartenders or liquor store cashiers. But it's getting cold, and he's been avoiding the humiliation of the shelter and soup kitchens, some stupid sense of pride or whatever the fuck it is keeping him away.

But when he wakes up with the dew on his clothes halfway frosted over, he says “fuck it” and trudges towards the nearest homeless shelter.

Maybe he'll say “fuck it” and join the ranks of the panhandlers and sign-holders, too.

He puts his name on the bed list, with instructions from the security guard to come back at seven that night, and wanders out, throat and fingers itching, wishing he had money for a drink. Instead, he finds himself crumpled in a corner near the strip mall, watching the buskers across the street and wishing he had some sort of talent, anything at all. But the only talent he's ever had is fucking everything up. There's a hole in heel of his shoe. His hair had been a curly mess to begin with, but now it hangs long and stringy past his shoulders; he ties it up with rubber bands that rip chunks of hair out when he pulls them off at night. The cuffs of his hoodie are threadbare and ragged; he gets the feeling all of him looks threadbare and ragged. People don't look at him when they pass him. He wonders if maybe he's turned invisible, turned grey and black like the walls he leans up against. Even the bartenders and liquor store cashiers look straight through him in the early hours of the mornings. It's hilarious how much nothing he amounts to.

He's in the alley outside the shelter at seven, and its a wonder he makes it onto the bed list with the cold coming in. The security guard calls his name and jerks his head toward the door when he lurches forward nervously.

He's ushered into a small room with an officer at a desk. The man nods him into the seat in front of the desk and glances towards his computer. Something coils tightly around Grantaire's head and squeezes as he answers the entry questions: name, age, situation, substance abuse history, medications, rules, the warning that all substances including alcohol are absolutely not permitted, that a shower is required before taking a bed for the night, that belongings must be checked in behind the front desk, that the shelter has to be vacated by nine in the morning and night curfew is eight each night.

The shower is absolutely scalding hot, so much that he wonders if he'll blister, but it's a change from the cold wind on his skin and the cold snow that settles in his bones and snakes between his ribs. He feels like an idiot child. He's not allowed to have his backpack. He's not allowed to leave now that he's in the building. He's not allowed to have food. He's not allowed to have anything but the clothes on his back. He's scared to talk or even go take a piss for fear that he might do something that will get him kicked back onto the street. There are so many people crammed into the shelter it makes him nervous, and he chews on his fingernails until they bleed, his shoulders up around his ears. His “bed” is essentially a roll mattress on the floor between bunks, but it's better than nothing, and he's surprised to find he's so exhausted that he drops off to sleep despite the other men snoring and chattering around him.

Only, he wakes up at six in the morning to movement around him, itching for a drink and nervous about too many strangers shuffling and arguing above his place on the floor. It's a close thing, but he manages to muster up some of that invisibility, retrieves his backpack and slips out of the shelter without drawing much attention to himself. It must be a fluke, he thinks, and doesn't expect that to happen ever again. There are a couple of quarters where he hid them in his shoe overnight, and he does at least manage to get a bag of chips from the vending machine outside the corner store.

And then he finds himself waiting. Waiting for seven. Waiting for someone to notice him huddled in the corner and take pity. Waiting for someone to come yell at him for loitering. Waiting to somehow manage to panhandle enough cash to make that fucking itch get out of his throat and back away from the veins in his wrists and stop pressing on his lungs. Waiting for someone to bum him a cigarette so he can distract his fucking brain with a nicotine rush. He ducks into a Starbucks to get warm, but he can only sit there so long with a sketchbook and no drink and dirty hair and a torn-up backpack before the baristas and customers start giving him strange looks and he decides to get out before someone kicks him out.

Honestly, Grantaire is surprised that he's still surprised at the sheer number of times he can fuck everything up. That he still feels shame and hurt and shock when something crumbles in his grasp, when he destroys something completely without even trying.

Because sleeping in a somewhat safe place, somewhat warm, with a roof and maybe some vague intimation of protection is too good to be true. Of course it is. And of course Grantaire only takes half a week before he's fucking it up again.

Because it's been a good day today. Maybe because it's because all the holidays are slowly looming, the world growing cold and orange and jack-o-lanterns in every shop window even though it's not even October, or maybe because it isn't snowing yet but it's fucking cold like it could be. But he's rattled up enough change with his styrofoam cup and his dumb cardboard sign to get two bottles and even a cheap egg salad sandwich from the corner store. So he sits in the park and pretends to be happy and drinks most of a bottle of whiskey while he waits for eight o'clock to roll around. The other bottle sits in his backpack for later. Maybe if the rest of the day is nice like this it can be a little present to himself.

At eight he's lined up outside the shelter to find his place in the bed list and check in his meager belongings and try to get some rest despite the concrete floor under his bed roll and the stinking, noisy bodies around him.

He hands his backpack in through the window like he's been doing every evening for the last few days, slumping a little against the wall and hoping he doesn't smell as bad as the man behind him in line. Part of him wishes he could go back to Leroy's. Part of him wishes he could go fucking _home_. Part of him just wants to run screaming through the streets, drunk and fucking angry. Mostly he just wants to find some corner somewhere and sit there and drown himself and stop _thinking_ so goddamn much.

“You need to leave.”

The hard voice breaks him from his reverie and he frowns. “What?”

The woman behind the window his holding his backpack out to him. She's supposed to be putting it behind the desk like all the rest of everyone else's belongings. She shakes it a little in his face. “You need to leave. You're violating the no substance rules.” Grantaire shakes his head, confused. “You're not allowed in with any substance, that includes alcohol. I can get security if you'd prefer that.”

The fucking extra bottle of whiskey. The good day was fucking bullshit. Of course it takes one tiny pretend thought of potential happiness for Grantaire to fuck up everything. The tiniest, dirtiest, most fragile house of cards he'd tried to build for himself is already crumbling to ashes on the floor.

“No, I'll go. I'll go.” He takes his backpack from the outstretched hand, trying not to look into the woman's judgemental brown eyes or the gazes of the men in line behind him. He shrugs the bag on and stumbles out into the cold.

His ears are ringing. Everything feels dull and cold, that flat sort of cold where you aren't even shivering, you're just _not warm_. He walks. He keeps walking. He pulls the whiskey out of his backpack and barely even tries to conceal it and walks and drinks until he's stumbling just a little. He wanders until he finds a highway overpass, some bushes next to an off-ramp that arch together with a little space he can crawl into and wrap himself in Leroy's sheet and drink and hide from the cops and the day and life in general. He fucked up again. Of course he did. Nothing to make you want to drink and dull the world like the sharp fucking reminder of your own failures.

Someone passing by kicks a rock and it skitters into the bushes, bouncing painfully off Grantaire's knee and landing dully on the ground. Everything is so _fucked_.

In the morning he decides that these bushes, this overpass, is his now. He breaks open some parking meters, sits for a few hours with his cardboard sign, and in the afternoon he finds his way to a Goodwill and buys a couple blankets, another jacket. He makes himself a sort of nest in the bushes, far back towards the concrete edges of the overpass so he can't really be seen from the street. He knows a lot of people just sleep out in the open, curled up in doorways and on park benches. He still feels a flash of shame most days that keeps him from that.

And it's fucking horrible, sitting on the sidewalk in the cold, his ass sore from the concrete, watching people walk past without even glancing at him. Or looking at him and then looking away like he might bite or jump at them. Or looking at him and then pretending they never actually saw him. Like he's not even human. Having to sit there and hold a sign or call out and hope someone pities him. It's embarrassing. He's never been one to put himself out there, and now he can feel everyone's eyes scraping across him, scraping him out of their mind and tossing him away like he's a piece of gum on their shoe. Frowning and looking away because they don't want to see him as anything but another lump of shadow in the corner of their eye. He's not a person anymore. He's fucking worthless. More disgusting and pitiful than a stray dog or a bit of trash in the gutter. At least someone might feed the dog or pick up the trash. They just look away from him.

He scrounges dinners from trash cans or drags himself across town to the soup kitchen, where it's noisy and crowded and the smells all tangle together to make him nauseous and everyone's shoving and too close. It makes his throat close on him and his chest tighten, makes his shoulders rise slowly and the hair on the back of his neck prickle. He snaps at people when they talk to him, or he doesn't respond at all. People make him nervous. Everything makes him nervous. Everything makes him so tired, makes the spaces between his organs ache and itch for a drink.

And honestly he drinks more than he eats these days. Change goes into bottles instead of sandwich wrappers. He buys a carton of cigarettes and rations them; when he can't afford to drink, he'll smoke instead. At least his head is numb.

He hates this. He hates that he's always cold, no matter how many layers he manages to wrap himself in. He hates that everything makes him jump, but his brain is tired and his body is tired and he barely wants to move much less actually startle. He hates that he swings wildly between sucking numbness and feeling like every nerve is screaming. He fucking hates that he's shaking all the time now, and he can't tell if it's the cold or withdrawals or some fucking other thing. He hates that he has to get clean using paper towel sponge-baths in random public restrooms, that his hair is long and the curls matted, that he looks like a skinny, red-eyed, gaunt-faced drug addict who's just as grey and invisible as the buildings around him.

He hates that he has no idea how to get out of this, because he knows the booze has its claws in him and even if he does manage some sort of job or something he can do as a somewhat functioning alcoholic, his stupid useless brain will drag him down, leaving him lost and floundering and utterly worthless. So it's not even worth it to try.

It's raining, and he's out here with only the most desperate, waving their signs and weakly trying to get the attention of people running past, ignoring the lumps of soggy, sad shadow-creatures in favor of getting out of the rain. It's six in the evening and Grantaire's managed to get a killing of a dollar sixty-seven from the change people have thrown at him before hurrying on. Not enough for anything. Still eight cents short of anything in the nearby vending machines.

“Spare any change?” he mumbles, not bothering to look up from the feet that pass him. Nobody looks at him anyway, and it's cold and raining, so why bother?

“No, I can't.” Grantaire is about to put his head back down on his knees when the feet in front of him stop. “But I can buy you a hot meal. I'd rather know that my money was going to your belly and not your veins.”

 _Asshole_ , Grantaire thinks, but his stomach growls loudly, gnawing at him, disagreeing, so he shrugs and grits his teeth in a smile and gets to his feet. “Thanks, man.”

The guy attached to the feet is wearing a tan windbreaker over a maroon sweater. He looks like he's in his late thirties or maybe a little older. His hands are in his pockets and he smiles at Grantaire. “I'm sure you've had a lot of McDonald's lately. There's a cafe three blocks down that does nice hearty meals.”

“Marigold's?”

“That's the one. Would you like to go there?”

Grantaire shrugs. “Sure, I guess.”

The man doesn't say much on the way over, only asks him his name and how long he's been on the streets. The man says his name is Emilio. He's still smiling, and Grantaire wonders if it's supposed to make him feel comfortable. It just creeps him out. People don't smile at him. They don't smile when he's around. His family cries and strangers just frown at him or look away and even though he hates it, he really doesn't deserve a smile.

Grantaire orders an omelette and sausages and hashbrowns and a coffee. The soup kitchen has hot food, but it's mass-made slop and this is _food_. He digs in and doesn't even care that it burns his tongue a little.

“You've had a hard time, haven't you, son?”

Great. Now this dude is calling him 'son.' Guy's not even two decades older than him. Grantaire grunts through his full mouth.

“Listen, there are people who can help you.” Emilio's fingers steeple together on the table. “People who care and who can give you resources to get you back on your feet.”

“Tried that already,” Grantaire shrugs. “Shelters fucking suck. What's my other option? Prison? The hospital? Fuck that.”

“No, that's not what I meant.” Emilio peers at him, smiling. “You've hurt yourself with drugs. You've thrown away hope and you think there's no way up. You think there's nothing left for you.”

Grantaire scoffs. “You don't know me.”

“No, but the Lord does. If you come to Him, He will help you. He will clean your soul and make things right.” Grantaire can hear the capital letters. He rolls his eyes. “We can get you help, if you accept Jesus into your life. We can find you a bed and even a job. You don't have to use drugs anymore if you have the light of the Lord in your life.”

Grantaire laughs outright. As pathetic and sad as he is, this year slumming with Leroy, living on the streets, scrounging and stealing to survive has hardened him. “You picked the wrong person to convert, man. I've never believed in shit like that and I'm certainly not going to start now. You people want us to believe in a god that fucks us over to teach us a lesson? Nah, man.” It's humiliating, someone offering him food just to try and save his soul, just to trick him into conversion. Like he's just a pawn to play around with. Just some stupid no one to proselytize to. “Go preach to people in a church. Idiots like me living on the streets are here for a reason. We're not gonna believe.”

“I didn't mean to offend—” Emilio starts, watching Grantaire shrug his backpack on.

“Thanks for the meal and all, but getting some guy's hopes up that maybe he'll be treated like a human and then preaching at him is really not the way to drum up followers of anything, imaginary dude in the sky or not.”

He leaves Emilio sitting at the table in Marigold's and goes back outside. The rain is still at it so he gives up trying to get change from passersby and makes his way back to his overpass and the little tent he's made up there out of blankets to keep out the wind and the cold as best he can.

He's sick of feeling like a loser. He's sick of feeling sick. He's sick of everyone looking straight through him, looking at him like he's shit. Of people asking him questions in those patronizing, pitying tones, or telling him he's only allowed to take their money if he buys a sandwich with it. Can't buy a sandwich with thirty-eight cents. Even the other homeless people he passes every day look past him, barely acknowledge him except with the smallest flicker of recognition in their eyes or maybe the tiniest of barely-there nods. Like he doesn't see them at the soup kitchen every week. Like they're not trapped in the same cold stupid circumstances. Like they're not just as much dirt as he is in the eyes of people walking past.

Maybe he just looks more miserable than everyone else. Maybe he just looks like he _deserves_ to be here.

This feeling like shit is a different sort of feeling like shit. Before, he could drink to make everything feel wobbly, to turn down the sound on everything and change the muffling fog into a comfortable numbness. Before, he could drink himself into nothingness, into sleepiness, could drink himself into some other state of mind where he didn't really have to exist or be a person, or he could be a different person. He could escape.

Only now he's numb when he's sober, and he's numb when he's buzzed, and he's numb when he's drunk. He's just numb, empty. Like a zombie, a flat, utter nothingness that feels worse than being sad, because at least being sad is being _something_. He's a ghost in his own brain. He just sits and smokes and shivers and stares at his thin-skinned, veiny hands and asks for spare change with his head down and his hood up, wishing someone would see him, wishing he could _feel_ something.

He loses his beanie somewhere, takes it off to take a paper towel bath or maybe to wash his hair in the sink or maybe for some other stupid reason and forgets to put it back on. He loses pens and pencils all the time but steals them from corner stores just as easily. Someone takes the tarp he's been sleeping on and he has to save up for a week to buy a new one. He falls asleep on his back on a bench and someone takes his watch but thankfully not the backpack that he'd still been lying on.

It doesn't matter. Everything's shit. Everything is so horrifically shit that he's gone numb.

And maybe it's because he just wants to feel something for once, because he kind of just wants to destroy himself, that he's half-drunk and wandering around, that he bumps into some random teenager who yells at him, slurring drunken insults that Grantaire can barely understand, but it's like he's outside of his body, watching himself yell back, watching himself get in the guy's face, watches the guy land a punch, but then Grantaire lands one, knocks the guy out and then his friend is on him, hitting him, and Grantaire is hitting back, punching, biting, playing dirty, shoving the kid down and kicking him in the ribs and turning and walking away. They're yelling at him, pissed off and in pain, but he just ducks down an alley and he's gone. His jaw throbs where he got hit. It doesn't mean shit.

He's still so numb. It's like a horrible anxious tension hiding underneath the feeling of nothingness and he _hates_ it. He's so far gone. He's so fucked up. Not eating, not sleeping, not existing, trying to find pain just to make _something_ happen. Something that isn't cold. Something that isn't seeing the bleak dripping cement above him or the crushing black sky or the boring, depressing grey pavement beneath his feet. He's itching to feel anything but cold and half-dead.

A tapping on the bottom of his foot wakes him up, something hard shoving at his foot, tapping on his ankle. Someone is talking to him. He jumps, twisting, one arm coming up in case of attack.

“You can't stay here,” the man above him says. Grantaire blinks. The thing poking his foot is a billy club, the voice is attached to a cop who's staring down at him in the dark, a flashlight pointed straight in Grantaire's face. Grantaire squints and covers his eyes.

“Okay. Okay, shit. I'll move. Let me get up.”

The cop watches him shove his blankets in his backpack, watches him rub the sleep out of his eyes, watches him trudge down the slope on the side of the overpass, out of the bushes to the sidewalk. He stands on the corner, staring at Grantaire under the streetlight with his hands on his hips.

“You're lucky I don't take you in for trespassing. I don't want to see you here again. There's a shelter on 37th and Rhodes, maybe trying going there.”

Grantaire shakes his head, hefts his backpack. “Thanks but no thanks, officer. I'm going.”

He wanders. His throat itches. His _brain_ itches. He steals shitty vodka from a corner store and drinks it in the open. The television in the window of a 24 hour fitness place says it's October 28th. It's two in the morning and he finds himself in the dark, wandering the paths of the park, swaying to look up at the trees swaying themselves above him. He's so fucking tired, it feels like the bags under his eyes are pulling his whole face down with them. It feels like his shoulders have been saddled with hundreds of pounds of shit. It feels like the dark has shoved itself into his brain and settled there, pressing in and in. He almost misses being an angry miserable teenager, yelling at his parents and crying to his sister. He hates himself and he hates the cold and he hates his brain and he hates the world and he hates everything. If only his head would shut the fuck up for just one second of silence. Even the drink doesn't make him stop feeling so bad. Even the drink doesn't turn the crushing numbness into a sort of tolerable desensitized static. Even the drink doesn't turn his churning thoughts into something slow and clear. It's not enough anymore.

It's like the booze has taken over, like it's turned everything into screaming in his head. How it used to just be sad weeping in his head, or a fog, or a tired mumble of dark thoughts shoving him into his bed, now it's screaming, now it's crawling under his skin, his brain begging for drink begging for death begging for some inarticulate thing that he can't even understand. It's not the way it used to be. He can't even enjoy drinking anymore. He can't even escape with it. Now it's just the only thing left about him. Just the drink and the itch under his skin and the blackness in his head and the hate in his veins and the way he can barely stay on his feet and the way he feels like a ghost in his own body, in his own head, in his own life.

He kicks a pine cone as hard as he can, listening to it skitter across the sidewalk and splash into a puddle. It stopped raining hours ago. The world is full of that heavy post-rain quiet, that two in the morning stormy dampness. Grantaire feels it shoving at his chest, something heavy that wants to force its way into him, or maybe out of him, and he really can't tell because it's all so fucked up and everything is out of control.

The grass is wet and muddy but he doesn't care and he walks out into the middle of the field that kids use for soccer games in the summer and everything is so screwed up in his head and he drops his backpack on the ground and the world is crushing in around him and he spreads his arms wide and screams wordlessly at the sky, screams his throat raw, trying to tear out whatever it is that's tearing him apart inside and pushing at his throat and scratching at his skin, whatever it is that has spun everything out of control. Whatever it is that has ruined him so bad that it's brought him down to _this_.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be surprised if anybody's still interested in reading this whole old-ass series! I haven't updated in three whole years, I'll definitely be surprised if any of the old Les Mis fans I used to write this for are still reading Les Mis stuff.


End file.
